The Effects of Distance and Number of Categories on Assimilation and Contrast in Social Judgment
Date
1990
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
This experiment focused on the roles that distance and alternative categories play in social judgement, and whether these variables create assimilation effects or contrast effects. The distance between a category and target stimuli and the number of categories were varied to assess their effects on judgment. We predicted that increasing the distance between a context and target stimuli increases the likelihood of a contrast effect. We also expected to find that the presentation of an alternative category will accentuate judgments of test stimuli toward the categories with which the test stimuli are associated. The results of the two experiments run revealed an effect of distance but one which we did not predict. The only significant effect of number of categories is not explained in terms of our hypotheses but in terms of Parducci's Range-Frequency Compromise (1965)